


mess (carry me out)

by powerandpathos



Category: 19天 - Old先 | 19 Days - Old Xian
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - College/University, Depression, M/M, Professor He Tian, References to Drugs, Student Guan Shan, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-23 16:24:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17686919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powerandpathos/pseuds/powerandpathos
Summary: Guan Shan has a month to turn his trainwreck of an academic record around and he’ll get the cap and gown and certificate to prove he hasn’t wasted four years of his life. That he’s going somewhere.Except that he has, and he’s not.[Request: 19 Days University AU]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This shouldn't have taken me so long, but hello, life. I hope everyone has had a good Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year, holidays, so on and so forth. Let's make this one a good one -- or at least try our damned fucking hardest.
> 
> Thank you to [Bhairavi](http://bhairoo.tumblr.com/) for requesting this fic from me; she has been more patient than I deserve and I'm grateful for her in giving me this opportunity. Thank you also to Damien, as always, for his proofreading and support. This fic is a tough one. It'll scratch an itch and maybe scratch a little too hard, but as always, I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to leave a kudos or a comment! 
> 
> This title of this fic comes from two songs: "Mess" by Chelsea Cutler, and "Carry Me Out" by Mitski. I highly recommend you check them out, because, well, #mood.

Xu Laoshi’s waiting room is a small greenhouse made out of a back-corner university office, and there’s little to suggest that the inside is any different to the out. It smells of damp and wet soil and Guan Shan can’t see for green; creeping spider plants and aloe and sleepy Boston ferns hanging like ivy from ceiling baskets, and they make him feel like he’s in a botanical garden. Like the reason for his presence is something other than what it is, like the pinkish kalanchoe are going to soften the blow of expulsion.

Fine. Not expulsion, but it’ll be good enough. A smoke-thick signal fire Guan Shan’s seen coming for months now. 

He spares a glance for the clock on the wall. He’s about to miss class for this, which wouldn’t be the first time in the three-something years he’s been at the university, and he knows well how this is going to go. The brief scope on how he’s handling things, which is not at all fucking well. The insistent hand reaching out and asking,  _ How can we help you? What can we do for you?  _ And the pièce de résistance will be so:  _ How does your mother feel about this?  _

The terms of his scholarship will only take him so far— _ have  _ only taken him so far. Given him a rope of special privilege—absentee father, medical bills, family struggles—of which he is now at its end, feet dangling with the struggle, the gurgling gasp. He has wondered, now and again, which will go first—the oxygen or the bone. 

Something else, probably, if it comes to bringing his mother in. Like there isn’t enough on her plate; like she isn’t drowning in pardonings and visitation hours and government fines. Bile rises in the back of Guan Shan’s throat. He’ll have no excuse. No good reasoning that will soften the blow, or make it easier for him to watch her face crumple up with another failure, another burden. Something that tells her, finally, that Guan Shan has been wearing himself inside out, raw and wet, and she’s only just catching a glimpse.

It’s why he’s come to the meeting in the first place, hasn’t dodged it or made some shitty excuse again, and it’s why he’s going to leave before it starts. 

He’s halfway to standing when the door opens, slinging his bag over his shoulder, hands in a tremor at his side. Xu Laoshi—small, greying, balding, on the cusp of middle-aged youth—stands in the doorway. He’s wearing one of his bow ties, and his eyes catch on Guan Shan.

‘Mo Guan—?’

‘Sorry,’ Guan Shan blurts. ‘I’ve gotta go.’

He admits that there’s something infuriating at the professor’s stillness. That he does nothing but watch Guan Shan leave. Can’t he see that someone is supposed to shove out their hand and stop him from this—this—he doesn’t know what to call it. 

Spiralling descent? Colossal fuck up? Potato, potato.

In a sense, what he tells the professor is true. He does need to go. He’s missed He Laoshi’s class more times than he’s attended. He’s not sure the brief email Xu Loashi CC’d him into to He Loashi will be enough to stop the lecturer from kicking him from the course, and he needs it to graduate.

_ Graduation, _ he recalls sourly, stepping out of the staff building and moving quickly across the quad to the Philosophy building, red brick and ivy vines. Fucking graduation. Two months away; an exam away.

He has a month to turn his trainwreck of an academic record around and he’ll get the cap and gown and certificate to prove he hasn’t wasted four years of his life. That he’s going somewhere.

Except that he has, and he’s not.

Because the failure’s inevitable. Not in a pessimistic worldview kind of way. But the kind of irrefutable certainty that comes hand-in-hand with memories of hungover presentations, skipped classes, unprepared seminars, and spending most mornings (early afternoons) with his head over the toilet bowl and lid already cracked on a bottle of rum.

The lecture hall is full when he cracks the door open, the lecture itself five minutes underway. He Laoshi is wandering the front of the hall while a PowerPoint ticks away behind him, a clicker in his hand. His jacket hangs over the podium and he’s down to a shirt and slacks with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The projector light reflects off the lenses of his square-rimmed glasses.

‘ _ Wertrational  _ and  _ zeckrational _ . Those are the words I want you all to be bleeding for the next week. Do you take the test because you’ve paid for it, because you’ve worked hard for it, because your family has expectations? Or do you take it because of the possibility of success?’ The lecturer spreads his hands. ‘Who can tell me what was wrong with those statements?’

Guan Shan finds a seat in the back row, where the light in the room can’t catch him. The reason he doesn’t go to the lectures isn’t because he’s usually too drunk or hungover or pissed off or a murky combination of the three. It’s because the postgrad in front of the projector screen is going places and standing in the kind of spotlight for an academic audience Guan Shan is never going to have. Lectureship, grant funding, a third book published, a hall full of attentive students who pay his looks as much attention as this week’s lecture—no, performance—on instrumental and value-rational action. 

‘Anyone?’ He Laoshi asks. He props his hip against the lectern, folds his arms so Guan Shan can see the muscles of his forearms flex, the dark strands of hair powdered across his skin. ‘You’re all unusually quiet for a Monday afternoon. Practically  _ forcing  _ me to use the list.’

A few people chuckle, and Guan Shan is wondering if Xu Laoshi’s called his mother yet. Will they bring her in, build onto the growing stockpile of worries growing upwards like a bonfire they’re going to set alight. And watch burn. And warm their hands against the searing heat of Guan Shan’s demise.

Except he wouldn’t burn. There would be no dramatic fanfare for a public audience. Guan Shan’s descent, such as it is—he’s certain it’ll be something quick. He’s certain. He’s been burning for a while now, a log fire down to the cinders. One concentrated blow and he’ll catch on the breeze.

‘Mo Guan Shan. If you’re here for once, maybe you can tell me.’

While his name passes He Laoshi’s lips, Guan Shan recalls another of the forty reasons he avoids these lectures. He picks Guan Shan’s name from the list like it’s been picked at random. It hasn’t. He knows exactly who Guan Shan is. The way his gaze finds Guan Shan’s in the dimness of the back hall proves it. 

He slinks lower in his seat. The motion draws attention. 

‘Anything?’ He Laoshi asks, staring straight at him. ‘Five minutes late, I noticed—thank you for the pleasure of your presence—but I’m sure you can come up with something.’

Guan Shan grits his teeth. He sits up. Scrapes his self-esteem off the floor. ‘If your family has expectations, you’re already workin’ to meet them. Nothin’s really value-rational.’

After a pause, He Laoshi dips his head along with Guan Shan’s logic. ‘By that, you’re saying nothing is done with intrinsic  _ good _ ? Everything is instrumental. Everything meets a goal. Don’t you think that’s a little pessimistic?’ 

‘Pessimistic?’ Guan Shan counters. He says, ‘Turn on the fuckin’ news, asshole.’

He Tian doesn’t call on him again. Guan Shan listens to the rest of the lecture like it’s a public announcement he’s been forced to listen to. His inward protest would be easier if He Laoshi wasn’t a tall, well-dressed figure made of charisma and dynamic presence and a tongue that talks Max Weber ethics like it’s something dirty. The hall is dim and warm and Guan Shan would slip into an easy doze if he wasn’t hinged on the way He Laoshi pronounces  _ Kant.  _

Around him, there are students tapping away on MacBooks and slim tablets, and Guan Shan doodles characters in the margins of his crumpled spiral notepad. He’s read the textbook; skimmed the lecture notes. The bare minimum has been locked away in his brain and He Laoshi is only making them sound pretty. It doesn’t stop the students around him from writing everything he says down like it’s gospel.

The problem, Guan Shan knows, is they’ll spew it all back to him in the exam like he doesn’t know what he said, like he won’t recognise his own phraseology written down on lined paper—like they don’t know how to manifest their own thoughts. The line they have to walk is thin; making a collage of original thought and evidenced study is the challenge, and sure, Guan Shan knows what he thinks. He knows his own mind too well. 

But being able to put it down on paper? That’s just the kind of self-acknowledgment he isn’t ready for.

 

* * *

 

‘Can you wait a minute?’ He Laoshi asks Guan Shan as he scribbles his signature on the sign-in sheet at the front. 

It’s a good question. Can he? Sure. Is there a single willing bone in his body that  _ wants to _ ?

For someone who specialises in the wide, technical,  _ subjective _ scopes of ethics and philosophy, Guan Shan finds He Laoshi’s phrasing lacking.

‘What d’you want?’ Guan Shan snips. The last few students have leaked out the doors to the hall, and Guan Shan doesn’t like the way his voice carries through the empty room and comes back to him like the echo of a seashell. 

‘Did you miss me?’ He Laoshi asks, propping himself against the lectern. ‘Turning up to my lecture for once… You  _ must  _ have been desperate.’

‘For what, exactly?’ Guan Shan counters. ‘Seein’ your ugly face?’

‘That hurts, coming from a student. And I’d almost believe it.’ When Guan Shan doesn’t reply, the easy facade drops, and He Laoshi sighs. ‘Look, are we doing this again?’ 

Guan Shan raises his eyebrows. ‘Doin’ what?’

The lecturer takes off his glasses. He’s unimpressed. ‘There’s a semester left. I’ve sent you an email every lecture. You’re  _ really  _ going to throw it all away?’

‘I came to your fuckin’ lecture, didn’t I?’

‘For the first time in how long? If you fail my exam—’

‘Gimme a break,’ Guan Shan mutters, rolling his eyes. The guy talks like he cares. What’s funnier is that he talks like Guan Shan has a chance at pulling himself from the precipice he jumped from a while ago. ‘You’re gonna fail me anyway. You don’t like my  _ attitude _ .’

He Tian’s brow furrows. ‘Your attitude has nothing to do with your pass rate. Then again, maybe it has everything to do with it. It’s why you don’t turn up to your classes and hand in your assignments, right?’

Guan Shan’s expression tightens. ‘You’ve given the lecture already. I’m not gonna listen to a second one. You’re not my tutor. We’re the same fuckin’ age.’

That’s the kicker—that He Laoshi stands where he does, and Guan Shan stands where does. Allotted the same time, gifted with the same opportunity, and only one of them had managed not to fuck things up. 

He Laoshi leans in, close enough for Guan Shan to recoil from the proximity. He gets a whiff of cigarettes and the man’s cologne, and it’s a kind of evidence and character insight that Guan Shan doesn’t want. From the back of the lecture hall, he was safe. Here, alone, Guan Shan can’t hide from the face He Laoshi pulls.

‘It’s three o’clock,’ He Laoshi says evenly. ‘You’ve turned up to my lecture  _ drunk _ ?’

Guan Shan’s stomach curdles. ‘I’m not  _ drunk _ ,’ he snaps. He’d taken a swig before the meeting-that-didn’t-happen with Xu Laoshi. Maybe two. The liquid courage hadn’t been drunkenness, just an effort to numb the jitters that had reared their head anyway. He should’ve drank more.

He Laoshi doesn’t believe him, and he looks at Guan Shan like—he doesn’t know what. Like he’s figuring out how many policy rules Guan Shan has spat in the face of. Like Guan Shan’s a sheet of paper gone through the shredder that He Laoshi’s been asked to tape back together. It’s understandable. Guan Shan wouldn’t want to deal with himself either.

‘There’s liquor on your breath,’ He Laoshi says. He lets his eyes wander Guan Shan in one long, sweeping gesture that makes Guan Shan feel like he’s on display and available for public consumption. A sign, taped across his sternum:  _ Take a look, see what’s inside, and mind the debris! _ ‘What the fuck are you doing, Guan Shan?’ 

And if that isn’t the question he’s been asking himself for a while now. If he doesn’t have an answer for himself, he sure as fuck doesn’t have one for an ethics postgrad.

‘Don’t act like you care,’ is all he can say. 

As if on cue, He Laoshi checks the glossy watch on his wrist. There are students dribbling in through the doors for the next lecture, tugging laptops and notebooks out of satchels and backpacks, acting like they’re not watching the conversation taking place at the front, and Guan Shan feels the pressure of knowing he’s taking up someone else’s time. 

‘Look,’ He Laoshi says quietly. ‘I’m overseeing a study session tomorrow in my evening office hours. Come to it.’

Study session? Office hours? Guan Shan thinks it’s strange that He Laoshi would suddenly confuse him with the kind of student that uses their resources. If Guan Shan had been at all drunk, he would have sobered up quickly now. 

‘Are you serious?’ he asks.

He Laoshi pops an eyebrow. ‘I’m an academic.’

It’s a jibe, a wry, tentative prod. It catches Guan Shan like sticking his head out of a speeding car. ‘I’m not one of your uni groupies,’ he tells He Laoshi. ‘I don’t have time for that shit.’

Guan Shan sees a muscle jump in He Laoshi’s jaw. ‘But you have time to skip my lectures and socialise with a bottle?’ he asks, stepping back to organise papers on the lectern. And then, cruelly, flicking to a new PowerPoint on his laptop: ‘How far is that taking you?’   
  


 

* * *

  
It’s taking him as far as a bar on East Gate, nestled into Haidian like a well-worn coat, a little threadbare, a little faded, carrying grease stains and the residual smell of stale cigarettes, but returned to again and again with wisened, comfortable familiarity. As it is, it’s almost winter again in Beijing, and the nights have turned colder and darker and Guan Shan slots himself into the dense crowds of the bar with an ease that comes with cheap whiskey in his stomach and a dense packet of marijuana in his pocket that will pay the bills. Or a fraction of them.

It’s nothing hard; it’s nothing  _ dangerous _ , but it’s only the third time and he still keeps his eyes steady and the hand around his glass tight and white-knuckled. The ice in his cup knocks together, and he catches the click of it over a grainy rock tune that sounds like reminiscence and too many cigarettes.

If the song sounds like it, Li Bao smells like it, and Guan Shan suspects that if the ship he’s on board of is only just sinking, Li Bao’s is a wreck of timber at the bottom of the ocean.    

‘He didn’t even give me a fifty. Forty-nine. Forty-nine percent. What kind of hard ass have you got to be to fail me by a  _ single fucking point?’ _

Guan Shan lets the whiskey burn his gums. ‘He’s an academic.’ 

‘That’s what kind. Fuck, you’re right.’

There are students and locals pushing their way around them, and Guan Shan pulls away from the bar and snags a recently vacated table for two, swamped with glasses and the condensation of sweating drinks. Li Bao slumps down into the chair in front of him, runs a hand over the grey-dyed scraps of hair he’s mostly shaved off his head.  

‘I went to one of his lectures today.’

Li Bao lets his hand slide from his head, and blinks at Guan Shan from between the hunch of shoulder blades. 

‘You? Mo Guan Shan? You went to  _ class _ ?’ 

‘Fuck off.’ Guan Shan slides his index finger through the condensation. ‘I go sometimes.’

Li Bao scoffs. ‘I’ve been signing you in for Jiang Laoshi’s lectures this whole  _ year _ , you piece of shit.’ He sticks his elbows on the table with a thump. ‘What was it? He was finally gonna kick you off?’

‘Was nothin’ to do with him,’ Guan Shan mutters. ‘Was either seeing him or Xu Laoshi for some stupid fuckin’ meeting.’

‘Oh,  _ fuck _ .’ Li Bao’s laugh is scratchy and hoarse. He throws a piece of gum between his molars and smacks it loudly with amusement and a cheshire grin. ‘And— _ fuck me _ —you thought He Laoshi was the lesser of that evil? Fuck, man… Maybe you do need to lay off the booze.’

If they were friends—real friends—Li Bao might have said that with some seriousness. And if they were friends, Guan Shan might have listened to it like the token of concern that it wasn’t. But as it is, there isn’t any real way for Li Bao’s words to have an effect on Guan Shan’s amateur alcoholism. For some reason, this bothers him. 

_ What the fuck are you doing, Mo Guan Shan? _

For a while, they watch the packs of students who are dancing over on the far side of the bar. There’s no dancefloor, but the music is louder there and Guan Shan’s side of the bar holds a monopoly for drink-covered tables and stacked, sticky shot glasses and cramped seating. There’s no discernible reason why the bar is as popular as it is—the drinks aren’t exactly cheap or well made, and the bar staff serve them up with a rough hand and a rougher tongue, but it’s close to the university and Guan Shan can take advantage of its boozy, stressed-out clientele.

After half an hour has passed and Guan Shan is rejoicing in the warm afterglow of his third whiskey wheedled from the impressionable barman who’d taken a liking to his piercings, a pair of girls makes their way over to the edge of Guan Shan’s table, the smaller tugging the taller one over by the hand. 

They’re young, probably freshers, and on the jittery level of being only one shot deep into a night that they’re planning on making last.

‘Hey,’ says one of the girls, the shorter one, dark hair cropped and buckled boots giving her a height that doesn’t do much for her. She has a clutch bag in her right hand crowded in bulky enamel pins, and Guan Shan catches sight of a Pride flag.      

‘Need somethin’?’ Guan Shan asks. 

The girl looks at Li Bao, who’s watching them warily while he stirs a weak vodka and soda with a straw, then jerks her chin. ‘Someone said you’d be here tonight. We’re looking for something. If you have it.’

Gian Shan assesses them. ‘You’re lookin’ at three hundred for three,’ he tells them baldly. The music is just loud enough for his words to carry clearly and go unheard by anyone else around them. 

The girls exchange glances, and it’s an awkward transaction from kids who’ve never done this before, and don’t know what their standards are.  _ Higher,  _ Guan Shan almost wants to tell them.  _ Always go higher.  _

The shorter girl has lost some of her bravado when she says, ‘I heard it was cheaper than that… Only two hundred.’

_ Well done.  _ ‘Then you’re throwin’ away your money on somethin’ that’s gonna last you ten minutes. This shit will  _ last _ .’

‘I can go somewhere else for it.’

Guan Shan shrugs. ‘Then fuck off and go there.’ 

Her mouth hangs open, and her girlfriend starts tugging at her arm to pull her away. Imprisonment is at stake and Guan Shan doesn’t take the time to be  _ nice  _ about this. He doesn’t take the time to be nice about anything. 

Eventually, her features sour. ‘ _ Fine.  _ Three hundred.’ She starts unzipping her clutch, a line of neat bills in one compartment, and Guan Shan lurches forward.

‘The fuck are you doing?’ he snaps, startling the girls. ‘Not  _ here _ .’  

‘But—’ She looks around. ‘No one’s watching.’

_ Fucking freshers _ , Guan Shan thinks. Fueled by the West and foreign legislations and a sense of the naive so strong it’s fucking astounding. He almost doesn’t hand it over—feels a swell of dread at the thought of these kids losing out on their education and their life because they smoked cannabis out the cracked window of their dorm room. But he does. He takes them to the rooms out back by moulding bathrooms and a storeroom choking with cardboard boxes and empty crates and bulk-bought cleaning supplies, and he takes their money. Because he needs and because, well, misery loves company, doesn’t it?

And when He Laoshi rounds the corner, sees the hand-to-hand trade-off like it’s clear as day, Guan Shan knows his evening is about to get a lot more fucking miserable. 

 

* * *

 

The girls, faces hidden, beeline for the emergency exit before Guan Shan can register He Laoshi’s movements, and he gives credit to them that at least they know they should  _ run _ . Guan Shan knows that too, but He Laoshi plants a muddled fight-or-flight response in him that he’s been trying to figure out for a few years now, and his crosswires must be fucked up because all he does is stand there. 

It’s an unwritten rule: the faculty doesn’t occupy the student spaces. The other rule, which Guan Shan should have known already, is this: a man like He Tian doesn’t follow it. Guan Shan had said it himself—He Laoshi is his age, a fast-tracked student with a quickfire hunger for achievement. Three years and he’ll be the head of the department. Six and he’ll be running the school. He’ll be Vice Chancellor by the time he’s thirty, and Guan Shan will be—where? Pissing into a hole in the ground from his cell? 

The possibility is real, painfully so as He Laoshi grips the wiry muscle of Guan Shan’s forearm and drags him towards the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind him. It’s empty inside, moulding tiles and an acrid stench of piss, and a leaking tap dripping with every pounding of the bass. The music is only a dull thrum in here, a vibration Guan Shan can feel under his tongue.

He Laoshi’s expression is irate. ‘What the  _ fuck  _ are you doing? Selling drugs? Are you fucking  _ serious _ ?’

Guan Shan’s face screws up; the hold on his arm is suddenly insenscing. ‘Get the fuck off me,’ he spits, pulling away from the grip. Any harder and it would’ve bruised. ‘I could charge you with assault.’ 

He Laoshi looks incredulous. ‘While you’re in  _ possession _ ? I don’t fucking think so.’

Guan Shan grits his teeth into a smile like a funereal grimace. ‘Two birds with one stone, isn’t it? I’d fuckin’  _ ruin _ you.’

He Laoshi looks like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or shout; there’s a war between the sharp cut of his features that settles on something like fascination, which still manages, somehow, to be condescending. It gets under Guan Shan’s skin.

‘So out of pure fucking spite you’d ruin your future to bring me down too?’

Guan Shan just looks at him. ‘What future?’

He has a headache coming on, whiskey and the vibrations of a subwoofer drilling down through his skull. Past He Laoshi’s shoulder, he can see the pale, washed out image of his own reflection, and he looks wasted. Not drunk—not yet, probably later—but hollowed out in a way that cuts at him to see. It’s something, he supposes, that the gradual degradation he feels on the inside is starting to show on the outside. At least it isn’t all in his head.

‘Give it to me.’

Guan Shan blinks. ‘’Scuse me?’

He Laoshi has a hand out. ‘Give it to me before I take it myself.’ 

Guan Shan breathes out through his nose. ‘D’you know how much this shit’s  _ worth _ ?’

‘I’ll give you the money for it. Now fucking give it to me, Guan Shan.’

Guan Shan feels the world shift slightly on its axis, an imbalanced shelf finally giving way, the crystal ball smashing to the floor. He’s careful not to step on the shards. 

‘You—You wanna  _ buy _ ?’

He Laoshi makes an irritated sound in the back of his throat. ‘No, you—I’m getting  _ rid _ of it.’ While Guan Shan stares at him, He Laoshi snatches it from where it’s stashed in Guan Shan’s jeans pocket—not as unobtrusive as he’d like—and sticks it down the front pocket of his own jeans. Guan Shan watches in a stupor. The guy doesn’t wear underwear, and that isn’t as big of a deterrent as he’d thought it would be to stop himself from sticking his hand down his lecturer’s jeans and tugging it back out. The weed. For which He Laoshi is now holding out a fat stack of hundred dollar bills. 

‘And payin’ me for it,’ Guan Shan says faintly. He knows He Laoshi’s rich—anyone can see that from the fancy watches he wears and the Tesla he keeps charged up in the main university parking lot. But this amount of cash so boldly offered makes Guan Shan’s pulse spike. ‘You’re so fucked up.’  

‘I teach ethics,’ says He Laoshi. ‘I know exactly what I am.’

When Guan Shan doesn’t take the cash, He Laoshi reaches out. He hooks a single finger around the waistband of Guan Shan’s jeans, and tugs. A space appears, a gap just wide enough for He Laoshi to slide down the row of bills until they’re neatly, snugly pressed against his skin. He Laoshi snaps the band back.

In Guan Shan’s head: sirens.

It’s hot in here—must be planted next to a boiler room or the kitchens pushing out baskets of waffle fries and grilled meats—and a bead of sweat lands itself on the corner of Guan Shan’s mouth. He sees He Laoshi watching it

‘You’re drunk,’ Guan Shan says, feels the day repeating itself like there’s some fucking dismal power at play—watching them both make the same mistakes and letting them know that people don’t all get dealt the same consequences. 

Guan Shan’s comment is enough to create a parting between them, a patch of space Guan Shan resents, just for a minute—something that breaks the  _ whatever the fuck that was  _ between them—and He Laoshi rolls his eyes. ‘Drunk,’ he says flatly, calling it out for the bullshit it is. ‘I’m allowed a few drinks. Off duty.’

‘You’re allowed to do drug deals too? I have a friend here who’s trainin’ to be—’

He Laoshi runs a thumbnail along his jawline, nodding. ‘Zhan Zhengxi. I saw him at the bar. We grew up in the same area. He’ll be a good officer when he’s done his training.’

‘And you’re just—’ Guan Shan stops when the door opens. They watch as some guy with his hair in a bun takes a piss in the central urinal, presses the flusher, does up his zipper, and washes his hands with a cursory sprinkle of tap water and a wet swipe across the front of his skinny jeans. He glances between He Laoshi and Guan Shan, nods warily, and leaves.

When the door slams shut again, Guan Shan shakes his head. ‘I don’t fuckin’  _ get _ you.’

‘Is that what I’m here for?’ He Laoshi asks, goading. ‘For you to get me?’

His university lecturer has just taken ten grams of weed from him and give him more than any seasoned buyer would ever offer him. He doubts he’d even get that much from the greenies whose purchase he just officiated. His  _ lecturer.  _ The hard ass academic who skimps on one percents and plagues Guan Shan in class like his travesty of an academic record is a joke. Who pushes him to come to class. Who tells him to come to study sessions. Who asks where he’s been and tries to set him straight because fuck knows no one else is trying to—not even himself. 

‘Why’re you doin’ this,’ Guan Shan says. He’s backed himself against the edge of a sink with a crack through the ceramic and a slope to it that makes it look like, with any weight applied, it would peel away from the wall. Guan Shan doesn’t use it as support, but there’s a comfort in having something at his back for once. ‘I’m a shit student.’

‘You’re on scholarship.’

‘So what?’ Guan Shan retorts. ‘I was their annual charity case. That doesn’t mean shit.’

‘It means you don’t see things like the other students,’ He Laoshi says. ‘You’re not just there because you’re filling out a family expectation.’

‘You don’t know that,’ he says. He thinks about how dry his mouth feels right now, how his stomach is starting to hurt. Vindictively, he sets more of his weight onto the sink; there’s a slight give. ‘You don’t know why I’m here.’

‘Why is that?’ He Laoshi says, ‘Tell me. Because fuck knows I’ve been wondering what you’re doing in my class for a while now.’ 

Guan Shan could tell him, because god knows he’s been keeping it all stifled like an overwatered plant for long enough, roots drowning in too much water—too much white rum and the glass shards of broken beer bottles—and there’s a kind of sickness that comes with the perpetual hangover that he both hates and doesn’t know how to stop. Except with pouring out more. He could give He Laoshi the spiel about needing to understand the fucked-up inequalities the world has to offer and studying the endless,  _ endless  _ hypotheses that try to offer him some kind of sense about good and evil and what’s beyond, and why people commit genocide and if a war is really just and what’s in the motivation of an action. He could talk about how he doesn’t fit in with the identities of everyone else around him and how that kind of exhaustion makes him wonder if he was ever meant to be here at all. If  _ maybe  _ the world was designed for some people with a clear, open kind of consciousness that makes living with it all so fucking easy—and not designed for someone like him. Someone who spends more time indulging in the ideation with one more glass in his hand than is really healthy and—

He doesn’t. 

He’s not going to admit to it in the dingy confines of a bar that stinks of piss. He’s not going to give it to someone who knows how to psychoanalyse and use their findings to their advantage. He’s not going to give it to a guy like He Tian.

‘Couldn’t get a job without a degree, could I?’ he says shallowly.

The lie sits between them like woodfire smoke, thick enough to scratch on the back of a throat, not too much that they can’t see what sits behind it. 

He Tian’s expression goes heavy-lidded, the disappointment stinging but unchallenging. ‘That’s what you’re going to tell yourself?’ he asks. 

‘No,’ Guan Shan replies. ‘It’s what I’m tellin’ you.’


	2. Chapter 2

He wakes up the next morning with a bruise on his cheekbone and a rawness to his mouth like he’s swallowed sand. His alarm is on its third snooze, and there’s a still-damp wine stain on the carpet of his dorm. By the time he shuffles into a pair of wrinkled jeans with one hand and pours out a drink in another that carries the remnants of sour orange juice, he’s ten minutes late to He Laoshi’s study session. He remembers their exchange, remembers the ridiculously priced, quick-fire shots of tequila the barman said he  _ looked like he needed  _ after stumbling from the bathroom, and then crashing through the door to his student flat and the night devolving into the kind of night he tells himself he won’t do again—cheek pressed to the carpet, limbs collapsing beneath the insubstantial weight of himself, wry laughter twisting to hysteria—knowing even sober that he will, and if he’s going to go to the session then they’ll all have to take what he can give.

His reason for going? That answer fails him. 

A murky attempt of self-establishment, maybe. Of proving his worth. 

Eyes catching on the wine stain as he does one last sweep of the flat, he isn’t sure what that even amounts to anymore. His jaw aches from hitting the edge of the bed as he’d fallen into it, and it’s a small fucking victory that he’d even made it beneath the sheets at all, clothes crumpled in a pile at the foot of his bed, tap left running. 

Like a mirror clearing up from steam, the hazy memory of throwing up in the sink makes its way back to him as he hastily brushes his teeth and washes the dried saliva from his chin. There’s a crack in the cabinet mirror, and there’s dried blood crusted on his knuckles, the bone-aching, miniature fractures explained. Last night had been one of the worst ones—He Laoshi, the girls, the stack of money now hidden under his pillow. He knows that alcohol never blurs memory that’s already clearly cemented—the ones you know will stay even as they’re being made—and that resentment only makes him want to try more. 

But no time now. 

He throws a hip flask into his backpack and a few bills from the stack, and makes a mental note to pick up stain-remover from the store as he shuts the door. It takes fifteen minutes to get across campus, and he grabs a sandwich from a pop-up vendor that he doesn’t have the stomach to eat. By the time he reaches He Laoshi’s office, he’s missed half the session.

He’s never been there before, and it takes three wrong doors before he finds the right one. Like most of the faculty, it’s small, a little stuffy, but He Laoshi keeps it stripped bare except for a bookcase and a writing desk with a closed laptop sitting on top. 

He’s pushed the desk up against the wall, giving room for a small circle of chairs to take up the room, and a well of anxiety bubbles as Guan Shan sees, knocking on the door—‘Come in!’—that there isn’t one for him. 

‘Uh—I’ll just—’

He Laoshi gets up. Guan Shan can’t figure out his expression. Does he remember everything from last night? When is he going to pull out the bag he’d tucked into his waistband and reveal to the other students that it was Guan Shan’s? 

‘Take mine,’ He Laoshi says.

The others are staring at Guan Shan. He hasn’t showered, and only now in the small room can he smell the sweat and stale alcohol and even staler cigarettes that have created a coating on his skin and clothes.

He takes He Laoshi’s vacant seat, murmuring an awkward thanks as the lecturer settles himself against the edge of his desk, legs stretching past Guan Shan’s chair, and passes Guan Shan a paper handout over his shoulder.

Guan Shan’s eyes skim the sheet: lectures he didn’t show up for, topics and debates and theories he barely knows, his knowledge shadowy and hazed like a hangover. Wrongness is a heavy blanket: he shouldn’t be here. He knows it, He Laoshi knows it, and every other student in the room fucking knows it. He has He Laoshi’s gaze on the back of his neck.

‘We’ve been going over the lectures from the first semester,’ He Laoshi explains briefly. ‘Chinese traditionalism and its most influential texts, which are—’

‘Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, Legalism, and Buddhism.’

It’s an interjection from a voice Guan Shan is familiar with: Charlie Gao, a Hong Kong kid with a lot of smarts and too much of his mother’s money. No—his mother’s third  _ husband’s  _ money. Guan Shan knows the type—an ambitiousness wound and knotted tightly with his reputation. The kind of person He Laoshi probably was as a student at Tsinghua and his brief stint at Harvard, if rumours are true.

The kind of person, too, that He Laoshi doesn’t like to have stepping on his turf. He ignores the contribution, continues—‘Let’s all rejog our memories with some foundations. Can you summarise the importance of  _ li _ for me as part of the Confucian philosophy? Mo Guan Shan?’ 

He should’ve known it was coming. That his presence wouldn’t be enough. He doesn’t know why he’s still there.

‘I’m in more of a listenin’ mood,’ he says begrudgingly. 

‘What a coincidence,’ says He Laoshi. ‘So am I.’

The retort shouldn’t be a turn-on, but Guan Shan can hear the smile in his voice, and it’s an effort not to turn around in his chair and take it as an affront. It pricks at him like barbed wire—that He Laoshi is pushing him towards inclusion, and his determination catches Guan Shan on the underside of his tongue like cut glass. 

He works through it, drags out textbook definitions and half-sober revisions from the back of his skull like tugging off a stubborn dust sheet; he talks about the revision of oneself—the honing of a splintered piece of wood, sanded down and varnished until it gleams. How building character is about carving oneself out of something raw to achieve the excellency of  _ ren _ , performing  _ li _ with the right attitude. The right observances of law, and government. Respect for parents. Restraint.

‘Must be a foreign concept to you. Restraint.’ 

Guan Shan pins his gaze on Charlie. The comment gets him like a wasp sting in the throat but—fuck, he can’t blame him. One look at himself in the mirror and he’d assume the same, too: wild and untameable with no switch-off button.

Nevertheless.

‘Fuck you too.’

Charlie’s looking smug; the others—Li Bo Cheng, Jenny Wu, Mao Xao Dong—are biting back laughter. Guan Shan’s glad He Laoshi can’t see his face, and the way it burns like a setting sun. 

He Laoshi says, ‘Do you have an academic challenge to that, Guan Shan?’

Charlie sighs. ‘Seriously, Laoshi,’ he says, like they’re friends. ‘Don’t waste your—’

‘I wasn’t talking to you, Charlie,’ He Laoshi says coldly.

Guan Shan resists the temptation to turn, and in the silence, he shifts his jaw. He knows He Laoshi has given him a battleground, and he knows he’s thrown him into an arena that someone like Charlie would respect. But the thing is, Guan Shan doesn’t  _ want  _ the guy’s respect, and he knows he can’t win on his terms. He’s not that smart. 

But he hesitates—he doesn’t want  _ Charlie’s  _ respect. Something is scratching at him beneath his skin with the idea that he might win He Laoshi’s. 

Guan Shan digs out a commentator from the disorganised scraps in his head. ‘Kwong-loi said that we don’t have to share somethin’ to respect it. Or disrespect it. Customs are different. Attitudes are different. But they can mean the same thing.’

‘And so?’ He Laoshi prompts from behind him.

Guan Shan looks at Charlie. ‘And so my attitude to work might be foreign ‘cause I don’t dress like an asshole and carry around a fancy laptop, but it doesn’t mean I don’t know fuckin’ what hard work is and what  _ li  _ I need to do for  _ ren. _ ’

Charlie snorts. ‘Coming to class like— _ that _ ?’ he asks, dragging his gaze up and down like the edge of a rusty blade. ‘Talk to me about sharing attitudes when you’re not a wasted drop-out.’

Guan Shan narrows his eyes. ‘Guess things are foreign to us when it comes to disrespect, too. You can shit on me all you want but I’m bettin’ it doesn’t feel to me like it would to you if I was gonna shit down your mother’s throat.’ 

Someone gasps, and Charlie’s expression turns livid. ‘You fucking—’

‘Enough,’ says He Laoshi. ‘You challenged him; he proved his point. Save your face. If you’re going to make a remark on someone’s character, at least do it from their perspective, and not yours.’

Charlie gapes. ‘He Laoshi—You’re just going to—’

‘To what? Allow rational debate?’ He Laoshi’s laughter is cutting. ‘Fuck. You made it personal, Charlie. Deal with the consequences.’

_ Rational?  _ Guan Shan thinks. It almost seems cruel—pinning Guan Shan with something he knows damn fucking well he isn’t, just to give He Laoshi the opportunity to bring down a guy like Charlie Gao with it. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy it, but only briefly. The victory is swift and bitter like a lemon squeezed over a wound: Charlie Gao, humiliated by someone he admires. Fucked over by a guy who relies too much on his hip flask to get through the day and barely hits half of the kind of marks Charlie does. Guan Shan is the oily smudge of a fingertip on Charlie Gao’s crystal reputation, and it’s going to take a while to wash off.

The bitterness carries Guan Shan through until the session finishes, and Guan Shan’s focus is a short-burning fuse that implodes right around the time that He Laoshi says  _ consequences.  _ He hears nothing of the rest of the session, offers half-mumbled responses and draws half-formed stick figures on his notebook. He Loashi and his Daoist principles can go fuck themselves.

‘You look like you’re about to throw up.’

Guan Shan zones back. He Laoshi’s voice is suddenly loud. ‘What?’

‘If you do, go outside my office. Or be prepared to get on your hands and knees.’

Guan Shan looks around him. Everyone else has left. Mid-afternoon sun drifts in dusty streaks through the windows of He Laoshi’s office, and there’s a cloud, purpling and swollen, making its way across the skies above campus. 

‘It’s your voice,’ Guan Shan says. ‘Makes me sick.’

‘Really.’

He Tian’s sitting in Jenny’s chair; he manages to fill it two times over, and his legs are long enough to tap Guan Shan on the ankle with the toe of his shoe, if he wants. 

‘Is that what’s making you stay?’ He Laoshi asks. ‘My nauseating voice?’

‘And your face.’

He Laoshi snorts. His amusement is irritating; he should be offended, or at least cling to his principles enough as a faculty member that Guan Shan shouldn’t get away with half of what he does—or says. Even before He Laoshi had implicated himself through their late-night trade, he’d shrugged off Guan Shan’s impertinence and brashness like brushing snow from the shoulders of a winter coat.

‘You shouldn’t’ve shitted on Charlie like that,’ Guan Shan tells him.

He Laoshi folds his arms. His glasses hang loosely between thumb and forefinger. ‘Why’s that?’

_ Don’t act like you don’t fucking know. _

‘Because now he’ll shit on me for the rest of the semester. I bet he’ll try to pay to get me expelled.’

‘He can try,’ He Laoshi replies, ‘but he won’t get far if I contest to him being a little bitch. Money only goes so far in this place.’

‘Spoken like someone who has too fuckin’ much of it,’ Guan Shan says angrily. He gets up, feeling something under his skin like watching a livewire, a small, burning shock that he can’t scratch away. ‘You defended me,’ he says, pushing away from the circle of chairs and towards the desk where He Laoshi had propped himself earlier. ‘Why’d you do that?’

_ ‘You  _ defended you.’

‘And put me in a shit situation. Don’t pretend like you don’t know what was gonna happen.’

He Laoshi looks at him, eyes tracking Guan Shan’s staggered movements across the room, cagey and stilted like he’s tugging against a chain. He knows the kind of look he saw on Charlie’s face; he knows he won’t be forgotten soon. It’s the same look men used to wear when they came to the apartment for a visit; when they asked to see his mom. When they came searching for something they no longer had. 

‘Can you just—stop?’ Guan Shan asks. ‘Fuckin’ into my business?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Guan Shan stands still—faces him. ‘Telling me to come today. Fuckin’ me over with Charlie. Last—whatever  _ last night  _ was. I don’t know what you’re tryin’ to do, but you need to stop. I’m not some research project.’

He Laoshi starts evenly, holding back a smile, ‘I’ve got a pastoral duty to—’

‘Fuck off with that. No, you don’t. Wherever I’m fuckin’ up and whatever's happenin’ to me is my problem.’

By He Laoshi’s look, Guan Shan knows he’s said enough.

Enough and more than enough. What a trainwreck— _ whatever’s happening  _ because he doesn’t even know himself. He can’t figure out the inner workings of his head because it’s a tangled mess of bare wires sparking at a look and begging to catch fire. He can’t tell where he’s going wrong because every direction is a dead-end in a middle-of-the-night wasteland with no stars to guide him. 

He’s a mess. He’s a been a mess for months. Years, but who’s counting?

‘You need help.’

_ What? _

‘Not from you,’ says Guan Shan, spitting it. His ears are ringing. There’s no feeling of care emanating from He Laoshi; nothing warm. He’s a solid brick wall with a steel core and Guan Shan couldn’t pull him down if he tried. If he threw himself at He Laoshi, would he waver? Would he break? Would he hold up if Guan Shan leaned his weight against him?

‘Then who?’ He Laoshi presses. He’s suddenly closer, and Guan Shan can’t think. ‘A counsellor? Xu Laoshi, or another professor?’

‘Stop.’

‘Your mother—’

_ ‘Stop, He Laoshi.’ _

He’s going to be sick. He’s going to throw up all over the varnished surface of He Laoshi’s office, and it’s going to stain, and the smell of it is going to last for days and—

‘Fuck’s sake, Guan Shan, just let me help—’

_ ‘I SAID STOP!’  _

His voice rips out of him like a screaming wind, and he feels like he’s only made of his heart beat and the single  _ thud thud thud  _ which, fuck it all, just won’t come to a stop. He Tian sways momentarily, a bough in a breeze, and then he’s still, and his look is severe. It’s—grounding? 

He Tian could hold him with that look like a smooth pebble in his palm ready to throw, and Guan Shan knows he would go with the motion, propelled into the uncertainty of  _ how long will you keep me afloat? _

He Laoshi says, voice rough like gravel, ‘I’ll be here when you change your mind. Whether you want it or not. I’m not going to watch you fuck yourself over.’

Guan Shan sees the sentiment like a hand thrust down into a well, twenty feet up. He can’t reach that far, even if he tried. 

‘Don’t you fuckin’ get it?’ he asks. ‘I already have.’

 

* * *

 

When he gets back that night, warmly buzzed enough that he can’t tell whether he’s blank or miserable or if this is what contentment means, he can hear a TV humming static through the walls, and a microwave pinging above him. Someone is playing the violin on another floor, and Guan Shan opens his window to let in the sound and cool air. 

It’s stuffy inside, and the breeze feels good on his skin. He thinks about going up on the roof of the student apartment block, the sky starless and thick with lights, clouds moving silver-lined and fast beneath a still moon, thinks about taking a bottle of something dry and stinging onto the concrete. Thinks about the edge. Scraping him off the tarmac in the morning and— 

‘Fuck,’ he mutters, more of a sigh, rubbing at his face with his hands until it feels sore, and collapses onto his bed with a limbless heave. The cash in his pillow is hard beneath his head, but he’s tired enough not to mind. Everything aches. He needs to eat something, but sleeping has become an easy solution lately.

He dozes, falls asleep for maybe a few minutes. He should go over the notes from He Laoshi’s session—what he remembers of it, at least. There are unfinished essays on his too-many-years-old laptop, due months ago, deadlines extended into the ether, and he indulges in the thought of continuing them, half-sober sentences stringed into coherency.

When the door knocks, he thinks nothing of it. Thinks maybe it’s Jian Yi, come to ask him weeks later why Guan Shan stopped replying to his texts and calls and unresponsive visits. Maybe Zhengxi, asking him the same as representative. A small, tiny part of him like a crevice behind his ribcage, twists strangely when he thinks it might be He Laoshi. Turning up to sort him out. Coming to tell him he isn’t giving up that easy, that just letting him leave and giving him the agency to return of his own accord is a mistake. 

But it isn’t. 

When he scuffs across the floor, slippers threadbare and worn down, opens the door to a stranger with a tattoo on his cheekbone and something bronze on his knuckles, his mind goes blank. 

He starts, strangled, ‘You’re not—’

They swing.

 

* * *

 

‘Did they take anything?’

‘Just the— _ fuck, ow _ —just the cash.’

‘Sorry… How’d they even know about it?’

‘I don’t fuckin’ now. They’re always— _ fuck, _ Jian Yi!—always watchin’.’

‘You gonna call the police?’

‘The fuck do you think?’

Jian Yi sighs. He drops the needle in the sink with used cotton pads soaked in alcohol and blood and broken string, and settles himself on the edge of the sink. He’s just tall enough that his toes touch the tiles, just short and young enough that he swings his feet so his heels tap against the cabinet doors.

‘You’ve been ghosting me,’ Jian Yi says, tugging off a pair of rubber gloves and tossing them in the sink. There’s a chalky residue on his skin, and he wipes it into the fabric of his grey trackpants. ‘I’ve sent you like… a  _ hundred _ messages.’

Guan Shan would roll his eyes, but it hurts. There’s a cut above his eyebrow and the swelling on his jawline is the size of a small golf ball, and he’s wondering how much the pain will go by the time he’s taken a handful of codeine smuggled from his mother’s apartment for her headaches and a bottle of  _ baijiu _ . He presses the alcohol wipe harder into the newly stitched gauge on his head, ignores the throb of his ribs that he doesn’t want to check. He doesn’t want Jian Yi to know; he makes his movements careful and bites back the knifing twinges with a swig of freezer-cold vodka until the sting on his tongue is distracting.

He should’ve known this would happen. Third time’s the charm of taking what they’re owed and making Guan Shan know they’ve come for it. He shouldn’t have forgotten, and he doesn’t know how he did; the weight of his father’s debt is exhausting. He never thought it would be this hard to carry.

_ At least it’s me and not her,  _ he thinks.

‘I’ve been busy,’ he mumbles. Busy scraping himself off bathroom tiles and busy fucking up the rest of his very short life.  _ So much potential,  _ they’d say. They already say. It’s a certain kind of failure when you’re spoken about like you’re already dead.

Jian Yi raises his eyebrows, and he stares at Guan Shan in a way that says he looks exactly like how he feels. 

‘Drinking and smoking and doing fuck all else?’ Jian Yi asks. ‘We used to have  _ fun _ , Guan Shan. One day everything was fine and the next you just dropped off the face of the earth. Where’d you go?’ 

If he’s honest, Guan Shan doesn’t remember much about a time when  _ everything was fine. _

‘I told you,’ Guan Shan says. ‘Busy. Not like you weren’t doin’ all your medic shit anyway. And you’ve got Zhengxi.’

Jian Yi frowns at him. He can’t dispute it, and maybe it’s unfair of Guan Shan to play the card of  _ not being the favourite _ , but he isn’t trying to make Jian Yi feel guilty. It’s fact: Jian Yi has and only ever will need Zhan Zhengxi before anyone else; the Guan Shan-shaped hole in his social life is temporary and will, like a small wound, heal over time.

‘You shouldn’t stay here tonight,’ Jian Yi tells him. ‘Your place looks like shit. Can you go to a hotel?’

‘With all that money I don’t fuckin’ have?’

Jian Yi winces. ‘Then come stay at mine. Zhengxi—’

‘Would shit a brick if he saw me crashing on his sofa. Thanks but no thanks. I like the guy, but he likes his space. Your space. Whatever.’

Jian Yi and Zhengxi’s…  _ togetherness  _ is something he approaches like black treacle; a concept, but not one he’d want to stick his hands into. He’s seen how they interact, symbiotic in a way that’s eerie, and the fact of their relationship does a grand job of shedding light on his lack of one. He’s not lonely. He’s not. But he thinks about waking up next to someone warm and having them to lean on when it gets hard to hold himself up, how in some kind of universe there might be someone who wouldn’t mind his brashness and his anger and would take what very fucking little he could give.

‘I’ll be fine,’ he tells Jian Yi. ‘Always am.’

‘Then let me help clean the place up. I’ll call Zhengxi—’

‘Don’t bother. I’ll do it. It’ll—take my mind off things. Or whatever.’

Jian Yi doesn’t look convinced. ‘You’re being fucking stupid,’ he says. ‘Dog shit for brain cells.’ But he’s already jumping down from the sink and picking up the scraps of medical waste from the basin. He won’t put up a fight, not while Guan Shan is grouchy and wounded and liable to snap if he gets prodded at too much. 

‘I’ll call you,’ says Guan Shan. 

‘Maybe  _ not _ the next time someone’s beat the shit outta you, yeah? I wanna do this for kids, not—’

‘Drunk pieces of shit in the Emergency Room?’

It cuts a little close to home, but he says it anyway. He’s in the mood for self-deprecation of a particularly acidic kind, and Jian Yi only barely manages to smile at the joke. He says he’ll check on him soon, pausing again in the trashed living-bedroom area, and leaves with a single wave of his hand.

Guan Shan stands in the silence of his tungsten-yellow bathroom, electricity humming.

The violinist must have stopped hours ago, the night a deep pitch, and the open-window air in his room draws goosebumps onto the surface of his skin. He can feel himself shaking, but he’s not cold: the adrenaline hasn’t gone yet, and it’s being followed too swiftly by the vodka. 

His place is a mess. There’s glass everywhere and an upturned trash can and his bedding is slashed to cotton fragments. His laptop is still there, too old and useless to be of any value, and there’s nothing else missing but the minted stack of notes He Laoshi had given him in an empty bathroom. Maybe it was Li Bao. Maybe it was sheer bad luck. Maybe he’d drunkenly flaunted it the night on the way home.

It doesn’t matter now. He’ll point the finger at himself and be done with it.

He doesn’t clean up; he can’t think of anything worse. Instead, he lies on the ruined mess of his bedsheets and closes his eyes, clinging to the sharp pull of every breath and how it tides him over. Jian Yi told him not to sleep, not yet, to go to the medic centre in the morning and get checked out, but he won’t. There’ll be too many questions about too many things he doesn’t have answers for. Not ones he wants to give.

He lies there until he can hear the birds outside, and then until dawn casts a grey haze over the skyline and his room is filled with a strange filtered light that looks like could put his hand through it and…

A week goes by. His phone rings for part of it—Jian Yi, Li Bao, Zhengxi, an unknown number thirteen times—before the battery goes dead, and he’s not sure how often he wakes up from a pounding on the door—‘I know you’re in there, Guan Shan! Don’t make me call the police!’—that always, eventually, goes away. 

Security could come, and then he’ll have to get up, but until then, he sleeps and goes to the bathroom to piss and douses his mouth with enough liquor that the haze, the numbness, muted confusion, stays for a good while. There’s something in the base of his throat and the back of his skull that is trying to tell him something, but it’s a voice above the water and he’s too muffled to try and figure it out, everything cotton wool-ish and—it’s fucking awful. 

Fucking. Awful. 

He doesn’t realise this until it’s Sunday and the whole week has gone and he can finally smell the vomit in his bathroom coming through the crack beneath his door, when his stomach won’t take anything more from him and begs for food. Something changes, and he thinks he should get up, and then—he does. He gets up with the intention of doing it and not letting his body drag him around, and it asks him,  _ What next _ ? 

A muted epiphany that he should move comes to the forefront of his skull, and he lets it take charge. Floating around his dorm with senseless direction hollows out the marrowness in his bones until he’s empty.  He doesn’t want to feel empty anymore. He needs something to pin him down. 

He finds seventy yuan balled up in the jacket of his pocket, entwined with crumpled bar receipts, and scrounges a handful of coins that have fallen down the back of his wardrobe. 

He buys from ramen from the on-campus convenience store, take-out chicken with  _ douchi _ , a crate of bottled water, and enough mandarins that his nails are filled with orange peel by the time he’s eaten three. It takes him the day to clean his room and do laundry, half the night to scrub his bathroom until the tiles are white again and disinfectant stings his nose and makes him cough more than he already does, and then he turns his phone on.

Missed calls, increasingly desperate messages, fifty unread emails—Student Services, Weibo notifications, professors, Jian Yi.

He skims it all, and gets hooked instead on the text that pings through at 3 a.m. from a number he doesn’t recognise.

_ I got your number from Student Services. If you don’t come to my class today I’m coming to break down your door and dragging you there myself. I know where you live. H. _

Guan Shan’s throat hitches. Of course the fucker would be able to pull enough strings to break student confidentiality. 

It sets something in Guan Shan like panic. Like fear. He can’t put a name on it, a tangy hysteria that fish-hooks behind his navel and  _ tugs.  _ It pulls him into the bathroom, under a stream of water hot enough that his skin stings and stays red long after he tugs a towel over it and pulls on a pair of sweats so roughy his ribs twinge. They’re yellowing now, bruises like butter, and he presses at them absently. 

He sleeps for a few hours that feel like minutes, and at 7 a.m. his alarm forces him into the bathroom to scrub at his face and brush his teeth. 

Walking through campus feels like a funeral march, the grey skies too bright. It’s cold outside, amber leaves breaking away into piles beneath Guan Shan’s feet, and he breathes heavily into the scarf around his neck, pulls his hood tighter around his face. He’s earlier to the lecture than he’s ever been, and the few students already in the lecture hall don’t notice him as he takes his seat in one of the back rows. 

He could sleep here, wake up when it’s over.

‘So you’re alive, then.’ 

Or not. 

He Laoshi sets his papers down in front of Guan Shan with his laptop and a USB. He sets himself down beside them, perched on the bench desk. The smell of cigarettes flits between them, and there are circles under He Laoshi’s eyes. His shirt is missing a button, and the wrinkles are deep-set. The lecture starts in three minutes.

‘It wasn’t a choice,’ Guan Shan says. 

‘Now I  _ know  _ you haven’t been listening to me.’ He Laoshi points a pen at him. ‘There’s always a choice.’

Guan Shan wrinkles his nose. ‘If that’s what you wanna believe.’

‘It’s not really a matter of belief.’ He says, ‘I’ll leave that to theism and scripture.’

‘Does the scripture say you’re the fuckin’ devil?’ 

He Laoshi opens his mouth, then pauses. ‘Depends. Which version?’

‘Huh?’

‘Well am I a sublime product of satanism? Am I Angra Mainyu? Iblis?’

‘Fuck off.’ Guan Shan clicks his tongue, leans back in his chair. He’s not confused, or impressed. It’s just—‘You’re an arrogant piece of shit.’

He Laoshi ignores it. ‘Where’d you get that shiner?’ he asks. There’s a strange edge to his voice, something bitten-off.

Now Guan Shan is confused. ‘The fuck are you talkin’ about?’

He Laoshi points at him. ‘Your eye. Have you been fighting?’

Ah. The glimmering yellow sheen still fading across his eyelid and the sharp juncture where cheekbone meets nose. ‘If that’s what you wanna call it.’

‘Is a fist to your eye socket something  _ less  _ violent than a fight?’ He Laoshi counters.

Guan Shan pulls a face. ‘Stop Socratic Method-ing me. I’m not from your fan club; it doesn’t  _ impress _ me.’

He Laoshi smiles. ‘I think I know how much it takes to impress you, Mo Guan Shan.’

Guan Shan doesn’t look. He estimates in inches, and promptly swipes the thought from his brain like dragging claws across scorched earth. He Laoshi’s raised eyebrows, supercilious and smug, says he caught it just in time. 

Guan Shan jerks his chin towards the front of the hall. People are looking at them. Among the drifts of students, Guan Shan knows Charlie must be watching, too. He Laoshi is too obvious; the way he lingers in Guan Shan’s presence is sticky like sweat on a humid summer’s day, and Guan Shan can feel it for days. 

‘Go give your stupid fuckin’ lecture,’ he says.

He Laoshi snorts. He looks like he’s considering staying there, settling in for the next fifty minutes and letting someone else takes charge just for the opportunity to toy with Guan Shan, but the conclusion is foregone. He glances around at the quickly filling rows, sighs.

When he looks back at Guan Shan, his words come low and carefully chosen. He says, ‘I’m glad you came.’

He gathers his things before Guan Shan can reply, taking the downward-sloping steps three at a time with ease, and Guan Shan watches him set up his presentation, fingers darting across keys and flipping the clicker in his hands with practiced impatience, before looking up.

‘Hope you’ve all had a good weekend,’ he says easily, conversations dying out, light seeming to fade. He continues, taps onto the title slide: ‘Today I want to talk about civic morality. The duty we have to each other as citizens, and to our state—and the conflict of duty modern thinkers suggest we should have to ourselves.’

 

* * *

 

Everything works until Friday. Guan Shan goes to every lecture that week. On Wednesday, he meets Jian Yi for a lunch of beer and fried chicken and streams a basketball game with another six-pack of Tsingtao, and at night he takes shifts at the car dealership a bus-ride outside of campus until his clothes smell of engine oil and his fingertips are stained. It doesn’t quite feel like living; it’s a superficial functionality that he acknowledges is, in the least, more than anything else he’s achieved lately.  

He doesn’t study; the exam is still going to be an abject failure unless he learns how to cram two years of case studies and academic evidence and scholarship into his head in a week, which he won’t. It’s a lesson in limbo, in scrabbling to the surface of survival and barely breaking even. He thinks of Sisyphus, the lectures on ancient Greek myth and philosophy, shouldering a boulder up a hill only for it to slip back down before the top. Eat, drink, shit, drink, He Laoshi—repeat. The ethanol goes hand-in-hand with the sound of He Laoshi’s voice. The tone he uses when he approaches Guan Shan at the beginning of class. Singles him out for a quiet word. Reaches a hand out as if to brush the lengthening strands of hair away from his face. Teases, mocking and too familiar, with a smile that is just shy of cruel.

He Laoshi flirts with the only student who doesn’t want him, as if that’s in his favour.

Except Guan Shan, feeling and heavy and warm in his barbed-wire attention, can’t be sure that’s true.

Friday comes, and with it a message from Li Bao. His name pops up on Guan Shan’s phone screen during a lecture, and all he knows is his decision will turn the Sisyphean boulder to dust—or it’ll crush him.

_ Fight tmrw night u in? ¥10 for the winner _

Guan Shan considers the text, and pauses on a reply.  _ ¥ _ _ 100? _

_ Nah bruh 10k _

Guan Shan’s eyes go wide.  _ the stakes?  _

_ Dunno about stakes but there aren’t rules _

The alarm bells started with Li Bao’s first message, but they peal louder now. A fight with no rules. Guan Shan’s ribs are still bruised, and he hasn’t had the energy to get out of bed much past noon lately, let alone take someone out. If he gets put down, he doesn’t know he’ll get back up.

_ Except death,  _ Li Bao texts him.  _ No weapons no killing _

_ that’s a fucking comfort _

A middle finger emoji is Li Bao’s next message.  _ U in or out? Ronan Sun wants an answer 2nite _

A grand. More money than Guan Shan had lost when his room was raided; more money than He Laoshi had given him. Enough to pay his mom for a couple weeks while he crashes at her apartment and finds himself a job that doesn’t need a degree. After four years, it strikes him sourly that this is the reality of it: come to university to make her proud, get himself a job his dad wouldn’t pick at, add letters to the end of his name that an employer would be looking for. Get somewhere. Anywhere to something that is  _ more _ . And he won’t be going anywhere—nowhere further than where he was at the beginning of it all.

He watches He Laoshi at the front of the theatre, thick in the throes of a talk on  _ The Death of Wonton _ , and while the students around him laugh at the morbid absurdity of altering the natural state of things, Guan Shan thinks— 

Fuck it. 

_ tell ronan sun to count me in.  _

 

* * *

 

The ring is hot, and too dimly lit, and the swaying spotlights fuck with Guan Shan’s vision while he tries to keep his eyes set on Jin Guo Zhi’s bulky frame, amber light falling on sweat like grease. He strangles the unease inside him, long fingers around its trembling throat, and squeezes.

The audience is spewing filth at him, spit flying, beer-coated and tobacco-infused, and Guan Shan soaks it up like sun rays while he hesitates at the edge of the ring, waiting for the whistle, waiting for the nod from Ronan, waiting for Guo Zhi’s body to come hurtling at him like a boulder in an avalanche gaining speed.

Guan Shan has his height but half his strength, and he doesn’t know if speed and carefully placed jabs will get him through this. He cracks his knuckles, flexes his fingers wrapped up in tape, bounces loosely on the edge of his toes. He feels mummified and stiff, bound up and needing a few days of sleep and weeks of good food and exercise before he’s ready to go again. He shouldn’t’ve said yes to Li Bao, but he’s made worse decisions when it comes to money.

Or so he’d thought. 

Four minutes later and the bets are all in. There are half-torn bills on the edge of the ring like he’s performing at a strip club, and when the whistle goes he’s solemn with the irony that it’s all the same: he’s here to perform, to have his flesh on show—his blood and sinew and the underside of his skin if they’re lucky and he isn’t. 

Guo Zhi comes at him like something wild.

A beast in the forest, something with blood on the trail and Guan Shan caught between the teeth of a trap. He’s shaking from its metal bite, skin ribboned and useless, bones too big to break free—and Guo Zhi lands the first punch. 

In the blur of it all, it’s worse than whoever had been sent to take the cash from his room a week ago. This comes like a brick to the head and Guan Shan’s already spitting out a tooth and a mouthful of blood when he reorients himself. 

His skull pounds, tongue coppery and shredded, stomach threatening to revolt as he scrabbles away from Guo Zhi’s second swing.

He’s  _ together  _ enough to get himself to the other side of the ring, can feel hands pushing at his back to get him closer to his attacker, and he’s fearful enough of another punch like that that he darts away again when Guo Zhi lurches back towards him. 

The crowd won’t like it: his bouncing back and forth, his evasive tactics that remind him of a conversation with He Laoshi, jerking away from the swipe of a tongue and a goading, taunting remark and—

_ SMACK.  _

The floor crashes into him. He doesn’t meet it gently, feels his wrist sprain on the landing, and can’t roll away quickly enough when Guo Zhi’s booted foot lands into his ribs. Pain explodes behind his eyes, and this time his stomach won’t hold—

He throws up on the floor, acidic bile and a few shots of tequila spewing across the concrete and burning his throat. Guan Shan sees the boot coming again—rolls away just in time. 

Someone in the crowd boos at him, tattooed and greased-up, and he hears a woman spit out a comment about his mother. 

It stings—not as much as the long-nailed grip Guo Zhi gets on the back of his neck, nails piercing his skin, picking him up like a puppy from the scruff of its neck until his weight isn’t on his feet anymore.

Guan Shan squirms, twists so he can get a hand around Guo Zhi’s neck, until he can get a thumb digging into Guo Zhi’s eye socket and  _ squeeze.  _

_ ‘Fuck!’ _

Guo Zhi jerks back hard enough that he let’s go, and Guan Shan doesn’t run—he takes the stupor to his advantage and throws the punch hard enough into Guo Zhi’s face that Guan Shan feels his knuckles crack. Guo Zhi staggers back, nose running with blood and mouth with expletives, and he spits on the floor with his fists clenching. His pupils are blown when he looks at Guan Shan, swallowing out the brown iris, and Guan Shan feels his stomach drop as he heaves in air, lungs unable to take in as much as he wants them to. 

Whatever the stakes are here, whatever they’ve both got on the line, Guo Zhi has more. One day, maybe a few years ago, a few months ago, Guan Shan’s need would have won out. But he hasn’t wanted anything enough for a while now. Nothing, maybe, except—

_ Fuck.  _

He wants to cry. Guo Zhi is coming towards him and all he can think about is some stupid lecturer who seems to  _ expect  _ more and  _ want  _ more from him than he can give right now—like he thinks Guan Shan can. He can’t. He’ll put more liquor in his body and it might exonerate him from the guilt of not being strong enough, but probably it won’t. 

Guan Shan’s defence is loose and pointless: arms raised, just enough to block the first few punches, not enough to block the rest.

Eventually, there’s nothing he can do: a rib breaking, jaw caving in, bones fracturing, blood running everywhere it can, pain splintering his head into useless fragments and—Yeah. Fuck. What else is there?

He takes it. 


	3. Chapter 3

‘The fuck didn’t you tap out for, dude?’ Li Bao asks him. ‘Fucking hell, you should’ve tapped out.’

Guan Shan can’t reply. He’s slumped in the passenger seat of Li Bao’s dad’s car, a beat-up Hyundai that Guan Shan is steadily staining with blood. He feels every dip of the road, every lurch of the unoiled breaks, every glance Li Bao throws him out the corner of his eye while the wheels shoot down the streets. There’s nothing left in his stomach to come up, and there’s a layer of acid souring on his tongue like waking up from an interrupted sleep; he’s been biting at with every too-sharp turn until it bleeds.

‘I don’t have health insurance,’ he’d told Li Bao before the fight, wrapping tape over his knuckles. ‘Don’t take me to a hospital even if I need it.’

Li Bao had cringed. ‘Why the fuck not? Your mom’s a fucking  _ nurse _ , bro.’

‘Too old to be on her insurance,’ Guan Shan said, and then, lying, ‘Didn’t think I’d need it.’

‘Aw, fucking hell… You know I can’t take you to mine, man. My dad would kill me if he knew—Especially after last time you—’

‘I know,’ Guan Shan said. ‘Fuck off. I’m just sayin’—’

‘No hospitals. Got it. Fucking hell. But if I have to…?’

And now Li Bao follows the address plugged into the GPS on his phone, barely making turns and speeding through amber warning lights turning red. Guan Shan doesn’t know why he’d given Li Bao that address, and not someone’s like Jian Yi’s; doesn’t know why he’d spent an hour or three trawling through web pages and emails he shouldn’t have had access to to find it last week. Fanatic curiosity? A burgeoning stalkerish tendency? Desperation?

He had no one. A mother he couldn’t burden, a father too far gone, and a man who’d stretched out a hand. 

_ You need help.  _

Tears leak from the corners of Guan Shan’s eyes while blood leaked from the rest of him, and he swallows a cry as Li Bao pulls the car to a gutting, jerking stop. He’s ready for the derisive irony of—‘You thought I was going to be the one to  _ give _ it?’

‘We’re here, bro.’

Guan Shan cracks his eyes open. The lights outside are dim, the car windows murky with condensation—his hot skin and the cooling night air blurring against the glass. He’s been fading in and out on the drive, catching on Li Bao’s panicked words, orange streetlights casting strangely on the back of his eyelids.

Li Bao takes Guan Shan’s weight as he helps him outside the car, a process of hoarse groans and too much blood and small explosions on the backs of Guan Shan’s eyes like shattering glass. Every step pierces his right shin; every pause for breath makes sweat sting his eyes and knees threaten to buckle.

‘Man, you need a fucking _ hospital _ ,’ he hears Li Bao whisper, pained, and Guan Shan breathes out heavily through his nose, thick with crusted blood and snot, easier than dragging up the broken shards of his lungs.

At the steps, the buzzer sounds to the apartment, and Guan Shan and Li Bao wait as it rings, and rings, and rings, Guan Shan slumped on a step with his head pressed, defeated, against the cold metal of the railing. 

_ He’s not here, _ Guan Shan thinks, delirious.  _ He’s not fucking here and I’m gonna die.  _

Li Bao was right—he should’ve gone to a hospital, suffered the bills, suffered the years of repaying the failings of his own body, his own sheer stupidity, carried himself around like the debt that he is. He’s brought this upon himself. He always does.

The buzzer goes quiet, and Li Bao swears, reaching towards it again, and then—

‘—the fuck is it?’

The voice is sleep-thick and annoyed, and through the dark, Guan Shan feels something in him stir.

Li Bao shoves his face towards the intercom’s lit-up camera. ‘He Laoshi, it’s me.’

There’s a pause. ‘D’you know what time it is? This is inappropriate. My office hours are—’

‘I know, Laoshi, but I’m with Mo Guan Shan and—’

‘What? Is he alright?’ He Laoshi cuts in. ‘What’s happened?’

‘He’s hurt, Laoshi. There was a fight and he said I should—’

‘I’m coming down. Wait there.’

The static of the intercom cuts out, and Guan Shan and Li Bao wait while the city’s suburban silence fills its place—tree leaves crackling, car doors slamming, late night runners fogging the air with their hot breath. The area is middle-class, high apartments with wrought iron fencing, secluded back gardens, and scratchless cars hidden away in basement garages.

Guan Shan is bleeding over the stonework. 

Eventually: the ping of an elevator and the smack of slippers against marble, and the glass door to He Laoshi’s complex clicks open.

It’s an effort to lift his eyes, enough to hear He Laoshi’s indrawn breath and the curse that spits from his lips.

‘You’re fucking clever, Mo Guan Shan, but you’re  _ really  _ not fucking wise.’

 

* * *

It was a safe bet that he was dripping blood across He Laoshi’s marbled floorways as the lecturer half-carried him towards his apartment, laying him in curses and gritting his teeth when Guan Shan groaned. He’d told Li Bao to fuck off in minutes, and Li Bao, looking tormentedly between him and Guan Shan and his father’s stained car, nodded his grey head and obliged. 

Slurred, Guan Shan takes stock of He Laoshi’s apartment—bare stone and dark furnishings, dimly lit, the second glass of wine on the island counter, the jacket strewn across the sectional sofa—the second plate. 

Someone else.

_ Right,  _ he thinks.  _ What good is a student for something like him but something to play with? _

He Laoshi is an adult, and Guan Shan is a ruined child who doesn’t know how to stop fucking up.

He knows this as He Laoshi lays him across a bed in one of the spare rooms, empty of personal effects and anything that could pin it to a particular person, the sheets crisp and unslept-in; as he catches sight of himself in the mirrored closet space. Blood has crusted over his swollen right eye, stained his hair a burnished red. It’s leaked down his neck and dyed his shirt well enough to suggest his rib cage has been torn open, and fuck knows it feels like it. His breath whistles through his teeth as He Laoshi settles him, propping pillows, pressing tenderly at purpling skin. The odd angle of his foot makes him feel sick, and he cradles his hand against his chest in an attempt to press away the pain.

He Laoshi stares down at him, face shadowed, unreadable. Guan Shan feels an urge to apologise—another to spit onto the floor. He doesn’t have the energy for either.

‘Who did this to you?’ He Laoshi asks, eyes scanning him, a thumb digging into the juncture of his elbow as he folds his arms, like it’s enough to stop him from grabbing Guan Shan by the shoulders and  _ squeezing _ . 

It’s the truth: ‘Me,’ Guan Shan manages. He doesn’t recognise his own voice, strangled and sputtered. ‘I did it to myself.’

He Laoshi’s jaw flexes. ‘Yeah?’ He looks at Guan Shan’s chest, shirt ruined by the neat cut of He Laoshi’s scissors, laying bare to the bruised mess of a ribcage. ‘Then tell me how you got your own ribs.’

Guan Shan shuts his eyes. ‘Just don’t—’

He hears He Laoshi snap forward, enough to spit the words across his face as he looms. ‘I’ll ask as many fucking questions as it takes to get a real answer from you, Guan Shan.’

Guan Shan breathes out through his nose hard, like a racehorse beaten to the finish line. The pain in his lungs crackles like lightning. When he opens his eyes again, the electricity casts a glare.

He says, ‘Then by all means, Laoshi,  _ keep askin’.’ _

He Laoshi stares down at him, grinding his teeth. One hand grips the dark wooden headboard, the other balls into a fist beside Guan Shan’s head. He’s angry. Guan Shan gets it. But the thing is—he could have thrown Guan Shan out the second he caught sight of him. Ignored Li Bao’s buzzing and told him to fuck off where he—they—came from. Left him there to rot on the doorstep that night and nudged his body down the steps the morning after. 

But he didn’t. He let him in, put him in a bed. And now he’s angry.

Guan Shan doesn’t get it.

He watches as He Laoshi pushes away, stalking over to the door and tugging his phone from his jeans’ pocket with a number already dialing. He doesn’t hear the call connect, but he hears He Laoshi’s murmured words as his footsteps retreat down the hallway and the bedroom, and decides he’ll go to sleep.

‘Brother, it’s me. I need another favour.’

 

* * *

He sleeps for three days, drifting in an out of wakefulness as the He’s family doctor decides via intravenous insertion. He spends three more in a limbo that feels familiar: staring at the ceiling, waiting for the drugs and liquor to kick in so the hours fall away faster. He Tian comes in occasionally, makes sure he eats, makes sure it doesn’t hurt, and every time he leaves for campus or the gym or for groceries or friends, Guan Shan wants to tell him it does. It does hurt. He isn’t sure when or if it will stop. 

He’ll be able to start walking tomorrow with crutches, able to take the sling off his wrist in a few weeks. The doctor will wean him off the painkillers this week, ibuprofen and paracetamol when he needs it, the codeine only when he’s desperate, and Guan Shan doesn’t tell her he’s always desperate. 

It’s a week when He Tian walks into the room and doesn’t leave just as quickly, like he’s taken a wrong turn. This time, he settles himself on the edge of the bed, and just looks. Guan Shan’s tried to stop catching his own reflection by now, skin scabbing over beneath stitches and bruises shifting in colour.

‘You’re looking better.’

Guan Shan looks at him, lying in one of He Tian’s beds, wearing his too-large clothes, catered to by his doctor and fed with his food. He says, ‘I can’t repay you.’

‘Reckless,’ He Tian remarks. ‘You expect me to help you but don’t give anything in return.’

‘You knew I had nothin’ before you dragged me up here.’

‘Maybe I wanted to exploit that.’

Guan Shan doesn’t believe him for a second—he doesn’t want to. ‘Says the ethics teacher.’

‘I told you,’ He Tian says. ‘I know exactly what I am.’

Guan Shan turns his face away, and his thoughts mull over. ‘Last week,’ Guan Shan says. ‘You had someone here. A guest. Smuggled them out the back door, yeah?’

‘You were bleeding out in the foyer. They could wait.’

‘And are they still waitin’?’

Guan Shan grimaces at his own question. They both know what he’s asking: is he still worth something to He Tian? Is he worth anything? More than some late-night companion? Fuck—does Guan Shan  _ want  _ to be something more _?  _ He Tian doesn’t seem like the kind of person who could offer that to him—a coldness filled with quick pleasures that stave off a burn like chilblains. 

And yet—Guan Shan finds himself drawn to him like a fire in winter.

‘Why are you helpin’ me?’ he asks, when there’s no answer coming.

He Tian says, ‘Why’d you give my address?’

‘You said I needed help.’

‘And you thought that was me?’

Guan Shan’s head falls back against the headboard. His bones ache. ‘You should’ve left me if you didn’t. Done us all a fuckin’ favour.’

‘I think I did,’ He Tian says. He rests an elbow against the wooden bannister of the bed, and smirks. ‘Got you in my bed, didn’t I?’

Guan Shan seizes up, mind shifting. ‘ _ Your  _ bed?’

Maybe it should’ve been obvious—the emptiness, the dark paleness of it all like hallowed grounds. No one lives here because He Laoshi doesn’t  _ live  _ anywhere, and Guan Shan’s lying in sheets ready to be fucked in. 

Outside the bedroom, Guan Shan can hear the scuffling sounds of some maid or cook wandering the halls of He Tian’s apartment, a man who can’t, cleanly, care for himself. It surprises Guan Shan, quietly pleases him: for all He Tian’s pretenses, he can’t do much for himself. He doesn’t have the will for it. 

They’re more alike than He Tian makes them out to be, with his spotless apartment that always runs slightly too cold. They’re both a fucking mess on the inside.

‘Is that what you want, then, He Tian?’ Guan Shan asks, voice gravelly. ‘I’ll suck you off ‘til my debts are done?’

‘Right now, you’re still my student,’ says He Tian, getting up. ‘You’re not coming anywhere near me.’

Guan Shan huffs in dry amusement, stops He Tian still when the man reaches the door: ‘Bet you’re wishin’ otherwise, though, aren’t you?’

_ I know I am. _

 

* * *

He’s getting ready to leave by the following day. He still looks like shit and feels like he’s been run over by He Tian’s Lexus, but He Tian doesn’t lock his liquor cupboard and the whisky goes well with his newly gifted batch of pills from the doctor. It softens things, makes them a little blurry around the edges, and Guan Shan doesn’t have to think too hard about falling asleep, or at all. It just happens.

One minute he’s pulling his own blood-free t-shirt over his head to brave the outdoor chill, the next He Tian is shaking him awake with a hand on the back of his neck, his limbs sprawled out beneath him on the bed, arranged just-so to stop the fractures and bruises from smarting.

‘Whargh?’ Guan Shan garbles, lashes brushing against the pillows with every blink.

‘You’re a fucking sight,’ He Tian says, coming into focus and peeling off the skin of an orange, ‘but get up. I’m dropping you back to your dorm.’

He has a dark denim jacket on, and the cuffs come only slightly too short above his wrists. It makes him look young and studentish. Fuck him, he looks good, and Guan Shan hasn’t been in the mood these past few days to spend time admiring the cut of cloth over He Tian’s unfortunately well-built frame. 

‘I can walk,’ Guan Shan says firmly. 

‘You  _ can  _ walk,’ He Tian agrees, ‘but why should you have to when I’m offering?’

Guan Shan eyes him suspiciously. ‘You’re goin’ in already?’

‘I’ve got a meeting. With Li Zhi Laoshi.’

Guan Shan pauses, pulling himself up. He eyes the ball of clean socks on the floor at his bedside, and decides against them. It’s a level of effort he can’t commit to right now, and being without one working hand makes everything far more difficult than it should be. 

‘You gettin’ a promotion or somethin’?’ he asks curiously. Li Zhi Laoshi is the head of the School of Art and Social Sciences at the university. Guan Shan knows He Tian rubs shoulders with the senior faculty, but it’s a cold breeze across his skin to really  _ know  _ it. The guy will be running the place soon.

‘No,’ says He Tian, chewing on an orange segment. ‘I’m under review.’

Or not.

Guan Shan frowns, getting to his feet and sliding his phone into the pocket of his— _ He Tian’s _ —sweatpants. ‘Review? The fuck for?’

The corners of He Tian’s mouth turn up. ‘Sleeping with a male student.’

Guan Shan stills.  _ Oh, fuck. _

‘Are you fuckin’  _ serious _ ?’ he asks, mind dizzying. 

‘Pretty serious,’ says He Tian, dragging a hand through the dark strands of his hair. ‘Honestly, I’m only irritated that it’s not true.’

Guan Shan’s teeth grind together. There’s a strange relief that brushes through him like the first quiet winds of spring.  _ Not true. _ Guan Shan’s the only one to have been in his bed, and He Tian has had enough of a moral backbone to not fuck him in it, too. 

He thinks quickly, runs over the false accusations, over pettiness with a vendetta. ‘Charlie,’ he says glumly. ‘He started it.’

He Tian only nods. ‘You were right. I should’ve been more careful.’

_ You were right. _

‘Yeah, you fuckin’ should’ve.’

It makes sense. There’s nothing Charlie could do to Guan Shan—no amount of humiliation or degradation he could inflict that would tear a deep enough wound. The power lies with He Tian; his is a reputation that he’s made easy to tear down. A few weeks ago, Guan Shan had threatened to do the same, and now the thought makes his stomach uneasy like he’s been struck by a storm at sea and the ship has gone broadside.

He goes with it, lets the water take him where it will.

‘What’re you gonna do?’ he asks. 

He Tian shrugs, and heads towards the closed door. ‘Present my case. Though I’m not sure how strong it’ll be when you’ve been lying in my bed for a week.’

‘They know that?’ Guan Shan asks, standing still at the bedside. He hasn’t gone outside in a week, has barely walked ten steps to the bathroom—piss, shit, shower—and back. There’s a small bubble of fear that thickens in the back of his throat when he thinks about it now. He scorns himself that he could find something like safety in this man’s home. 

‘They do. Charlie did his research, probably.’

_ Or Li Bao _ , Guan Shan thinks bitterly. The guy was loyal but that didn’t mean he didn’t like to talk, especially when girls were around. In his head, Guan Shan sees them gaggle while Li Bao gossips and chronicles his own fucking heroism.

_ And guess who’s looking after him? He Laoshi. _

‘I shouldn’t’ve come here,’ he says. 

‘You’d be dead if you didn’t,’ says He Tian.

‘Maybe. Or paying off debts to a hospital.’

Something in that makes He Tian turn, head back the way he came. He stops inches away. ‘You really don’t want to be alive  _ that much _ ? You’d really rather you bled out inside your own body?’

Guan Shan cringes and looks away. He Tian makes it sound immoral—he makes it sound like a sin which Guan Shan hadn’t been prepared to commit.

He Tian puts a hand on Guan Shan’s cheek, and Guan Shan goes still. 

He Tian’s fingers are long enough to cup the whole side of his face, and his palm is soft. His skin smells of oranges. Guan Shan wonders if it would taste like it too.

‘You came to me,’ He Tian says quietly. ‘You wanted me.’

‘You said you weren’t comin’ near me.’

‘I know what I am.’

Guan Shan swallows. ‘Get the feelin’ you think you know what I am, too.’

He Tian smiles, leans in. ‘Don’t I?’

 

* * *

 

They don’t talk on the drive back to Guan Shan’s flat. 

They don’t talk about how He Tian knew how to be gentle and how to make it hurt. They don’t talk about Guan Shan’s hand in He Tian’s hair and how his grip tightened with every push-pull, the strand of spit between their mouths, the oozing between Guan Shan’s thighs, the sweat that covered them both, still clothed. They don’t talk about how Guan Shan felt alive for a few seconds, how he’s scared now that this will be like the liquor, a soothing burn that blurs the edges and something which he’ll come to rely on. They don’t talk about how they shouldn’t—because they shouldn’t have; they know the rules. They know the cost. He Tian’s going to have to sit in his review and lie now. And maybe that was the thrill of it. A false allegation made true.

They don’t talk about it, but fuck if Guan Shan doesn’t want to. They both smell like sex. 

‘You’ve got your exam in a few days.’

Guan Shan leans forward and cranks up the heating in He Tian’s car. The heated leather warming his ass feels good.  

‘You expectin’ me to actually take it?’

‘It’s your last chance.’

Guan Shan snorts. ‘Nah. I screwed myself over a long time ago. That exam isn’t gonna change a thing.’

He Tian cracks a window open, cold air streaming in, and lights up a cigarette, the ashen end dangling outside, his arm propped. ‘You don’t know that. Could still get a degree.’

‘A shit one.’

He Tian huffs a quiet laugh, and blows smoke out through the side of his mouth. ‘Yeah, well,’ he says. ‘Something I learned too late, maybe—not everyone’s got it easy.’

Guan Shan shifts, aches. He doesn’t like where this is going. He doesn’t want He Tian to make it out like he  _ understands  _ Guan Shan, and where he’s come from, and where he’s going—or not. He Tian’s born of a privilege that makes Guan Shan’s situation text book, and Guan Shan won’t be his case study.

‘What about you?’ he asks instead—as curious as not wanting to talk about himself. ‘You always knew you wanted to be a teacher?’

He Tian pauses for a moment, surprised. ‘No,’ he says, after a moment of consideration. ‘I just knew I didn’t want to be what I was supposed to become.’

‘Yeah? And what was that?’

He Tian smiles. He catches Guan Shan’s eye in the wing mirror. ‘Less ethical.’

* * *

 

He has He Tian’s number in his phone, programmed the first night he’d got his text—his threat to show up to class or else. And now he opens the barren string of messages from He Tian for the fifth time that evening. He wants to ask how the review went. He wants to ask if He Tian told the school about what he’d done—what they’d done. He wants to ask if they’ll do it again. He wants to wipe the number from his phone and memory and never think of the bastard again.

Of course, he doesn’t do any of it. He scrolls through useless videos online and closes and reopens the messages until he has the sequence burned into his muscle memory. He heats up ramen until his room smells of spiced  _ tare _ and ignores how his bed is hard beneath him and his clothes still smell of He Tian. He lets Li Bao know he’s alive, that He Tian didn’t finish the job off. He thinks about how strange it feels that a small part of him is glad he didn’t. 

He calls Jian Yi.

‘You’ve got some fucking nerve.’

Guan Shan scowls. ‘Don’t think I phoned you, did I, Zhengxi?’

‘He doesn’t want to speak to you,’ says Zhengxi. ‘Stop fucking people over and calling them up when you need them so you can put your problems on them.’

Guan Shan throws himself on his bed and onto his back and sticks an arm up into the air, fingertips reaching for an unreachable ceiling.

‘I got in a fight,’ he says. ‘Didn’t want to put my problems on him. It’s why I didn’t call.’

There’s a pause on the end of the phone, and the sound of Zhengxi’s breathing, and then a muffled struggle for the phone in which Guan Shan hears a snappish,  _ ‘No, Jian Yi!’ _ and an even harsher,  _ ‘Just gimme the fucking phone, Xixi!’ _

Guan Shan bites his lip. 

‘You fucking idiot, Redhead,’ Jian Yi tells him angrily, conquest won and breathing heavy down the phone. ‘Brain like a fucking cauliflower, you’ve got.’

‘Yeah, well,’ says Guan Shan. ‘You knew that already.’

‘Where the fuck did you go? Your mom patch you up this time?’

It’s strange. He doesn’t want to lie—and so he doesn’t. He knows Zhengxi is listening in, that he’s almost passed his tests for the police force. That this makes him liable. He knows they’re going to judge him and think  _ something  _ of him that’s worse than they already do. But he doesn’t want to lie, and so he doesn’t.

He tells them. 

‘You—you did what?’ Jian Yi squeaks. 

‘Shit on a fucking stick,’ Zhengxi mutters in the background. 

Guan Shan waits. He doesn’t know what else to say.  _ My university lecturer nursed me and then he fucked me and I liked it.  _

‘Did you…’ Jian Yi starts again: ‘Was it good?’

There’s a smack, and an  _ Ow!  _ And then a silence of waiting.

‘It wasn’t bad,’ Guan Shan grumbles. 

‘Fuck me,’ Jian Yi whispers. ‘You fucked a teacher.’

‘A teacher fucked a  _ student _ ,’ Zhengxi says. ‘The guy’s gonna be lucky to still have his job tomorrow.’

‘Only if they find out.’

It’s out before Guan Shan even thinks it, laced with a venom like acid that blisters and burns where it falls. He recognises himself in it slightly, a vicious otherness that doesn’t rear its head as often as it wants to. Guan Shan doesn’t know where it comes from. He knows an attack is only ever a form of defence. 

‘Don’t, Zhan Zhengxi,’ Guan Shan says. ‘Don’t fuckin’ tell anyone.’

‘Course not,’ says Zhengxi. ‘I’m not going anywhere near the fucking mess you’ve made. And neither is Jian Yi. Sort your shit out, Guan Shan, before someone else does it for you.’

 

* * *

 

As it turns out, someone does. 

Guan Shan studies. He spends three days in the library and uses up all his printing credits to get the handouts from lectures he didn’t attend and worksheets from seminars he slept through. He writes up the scrawl of his own attempted notes and skims through secondary material on the reading list until the characters blur together and the sentences lose their syntax. 

Li Bao meets up with him twice, buys him lunch as an apology in the shape of  _ gaifan  _ and spicy soup from the campus canteen, and doesn’t ask Guan Shan the questions Guan Shan knows he wants to. He’s been studying too, but his averages stand a far better chance of getting his qualifications than the rubble Guan Shan’s trying to pull himself out from underneath. 

‘Surprised you’re even gonna try, man,’ Li Bao says, marking him with appraisal. ‘Thought you were a gonner.’

‘Have some fuckin’ faith,’ Guan Shan says, not having any.

Three days, and he doesn’t hear from He Tian once. Lectures have finished for the year, and Guan Shan doesn’t see him, either. He wonders if He Tian’s been fired. Wonders if he’s suspended. Will Guan Shan be brought in for questioning? Did Charlie even drop his name into the furrows of bullshit he was digging? Maybe he was just collateral. 

_ Collateral. _

That word plays a pretty tune in his head right up until the day of the exam, right down to the scrape of steel chair legs on the lecture hall’s floor, the gust of warm-bodied air that fills the walls, the metronome tick of the clock, whose pressured gaze Guan Shan can already feel. He runs through theory in his head, of the carefully worded questions he won’t know the answer to, of He Tian’s reaction when he marks his paper on a Tuesday night and— 

He Tian’s standing at the front of the hall. He has a stack of papers bound in his arms, and when everyone has their seat, Guan Shan watches him pass through the rows. He looks well. With bags under his eyes and mussed hair, he always looks fucking  _ well.  _ Guan Shan wants to pull He Tian’s shirt off and run his fingers along the scratches he knows he left on He Tian’s back. 

He Tian gives him his paper. 

‘Good luck,’ says He Tian. 

‘Fuck you,’ Guan Shan murmurs back. 

He Tian smiles as he walks away.   

 

* * *

 

He’s soaked in sweat by the time the exam is over. Two hours, and his hand is cramped and fingers blistered. He has a headache that burns a hole in his skull with every throb, the kind that can only be cured by a handful of painkillers chased back with something stronger.    

Which he does. It sends him off to sleep for a few days, which are pricked with the murky memory of end-of-year house parties and bar tabs Guan Shan has no right in paying for. He replies dutifully to Jian Yi’s texts, honours his custodial responsibility to catch up with Li Bao once in a while. 

But mostly he waits. It takes a week—or two, he can’t remember—for the papers to be marked. It won’t give him his final grade, not yet, but they’re all smart enough to calculate whether it’s a fail or pass or something more. He swipes through his university’s student portal the morning of the result until his thumb aches and drinks the tea Jian Yi had dropped off at the door of his apartment the night before, sweet and still warm. 

It tastes like berries, and mint, and Guan Shan nearly chokes on it when his grade finally uploads, slumping over his desk to bring the screen closer to his face. 

He turns his phone off, turns it back on, and stares. His pulse is lighting him up at every pressure point, and it hurts.

It’s an impossible grade. It’s unattainable. No amount of lecturing could give him this—no amount of cramming could rewarded him with what he doesn’t deserve.

There must be a mistake. A paper swapped over. A data error. A marker who knows his writing and his tone and knows how to meddle to his advantage and… 

‘Fuck,’ Guan Shan says. It’s half delirious, intoxicated laughter, half spitting fury. 

Of course. Guan Shan’s knight coming to his unasked-for rescue. 

Guan Shan’s going to kill him.

 

* * *

 

The faculty gathers for drinks that night; academics can go, if they want. Students can soak up their failures with liquor, if they need. Guan Shan goes because the lease is up on his flat in three days and he’s not sure he’ll make the effort to see Li Bao again once their paths come to a scheduled close. He goes because he gets a voucher that will get him three drinks, courtesy of their Student Experience Officer, and he goes because He Tian will be there.

He’s three free drinks deep by nine o’clock, and He Tian is leaning himself against a wall entertaining a trio of soon-to-be-graduates. 

‘You’ve been staring at the dude all night, man. If you wanna talk to him—’

‘I don’t. I wanna stick a blunt knife in his throat.’

Li Bao coughs, doesn’t seem taken aback by the violence. He’s seen people do worse; he’s heard Guan Shan promise worse. ‘Wait ‘til you’re graduated, yeah? It’ll make the trial easier.’

Guan Shan almost laughs. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m a fake either way.’

Li Bao sticks his elbows on the surface of the table they’d commandeered in the first hour, kicking off a group of first-years still coming down from the month’s stress. It’s sticky and smells of spilled beer and the faintest, fumy remnants of _shaojiu_ , but Li Bao doesn’t seem to mind. ‘Whadda ya mean?’ he asks. ‘You passed, right?’

Guan Shan bites down on his tongue, and two more bottles of  _ pijiu  _ don’t loosen it. He watches as faculty comes and goes, as students stagger through the doorways of the bar and choke down one more drink, and two, and three more in farewell. 

He should be one of them. 

No, he shouldn’t. He should be pumping himself with liquor until he burns out his insides and rots in a gutter somewhere. He deserves nothing. He Tian shouldn’t—

‘—have given me anythin’.’

He Tian looks at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

It burns more than the vodka, and there’s no pleasant afterburn to this. He Tian’s look is blank, and the girls that wander away from him in his corner throw Guan Shan ones of embarrassment. He’s a mess; can feel his eyes watery and his tongue thick, and his skin feels like it’s shaking his body like a tree losing its leaves.

‘Yeah you fuckin’ do,’ Guan Shan says. ‘You marked the papers. You’re treatin’ me like a fuckin’ charity case. You’re doin’ me a favour ‘cause I was a good  _ fuck. _ ’

He Tian says, ‘Did I say you were?’

There are windows behind him, thick-paned and leaking through lights from the city and nearby campus, and the cold air has fogged up the glass. Guan Shan’s looking through them when his fist swings. 

It doesn’t get anywhere, and he’s not surprised: he’s tired, he’s drunk, and He Tian’s just  _ better _ .

For all that Guo Zhi had a need to win in that ring, he would have been nothing against a guy who always knew how to. Guan Shan would have paid to watch it. 

His fist smacks soundly into He Tian’s waiting palm, and he can feel He Tian’s knuckles shifting as the bones in his own hand ache. 

‘Guess not,’ he mutters. ‘Guess you fuckin’ didn’t.’

It must have sounded too bleak, because they’re moving out of the bar when he says it, and Guan Shan feels cool air hitting his skin as he stumbles through a fire exit that creaks when it opens. The leather seats of He Tian’s Lexus are vibrating beneath his hands when he climbs in, and he leans his skull against the headrest. 

He Tian lets the engine run. 

‘You said it yourself,’ He Tian says. ‘You wouldn’t be anything without this.’

It’s as close to an admittance as Guan Shan’s going to get, and it cuts. ‘That wasn’t for you to fuckin’ decide.’ 

He Tian has a hand on Guan Shan’s thigh. The other dangles a burning cigarette out the window. ‘Were you going to decide for you? I don’t think so. You’ll let yourself fuck up because it’s the only thing you know how to do.’

Guan Shan squints through the windshield, the hot air coming through the car vents steaming up the glass. He thinks about it:  _ Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. _

‘Not letting me doesn’t teach me. You just wanted to feel good about yourself.’

‘Maybe,’ He Tian admits. ‘But you don’t have to see me again after this, if that’s what you want. You’re free to go and live your life and get a job that’s going to pay you a wage. Sit in some office nine to five and waste away the days because now you have a degree.’

‘You think that’s all I’m good for?’

‘I think that’s what you’ll think. You want to believe the worst in everything. I knew what you could do—what you can do. I know that exam wasn’t fucking it.’

‘You don’t know me,’ Guan Shan tells him. Reminds him. He can’t put him in his place and his words fall emptily. His victory is an empty one. ‘If you fuckin’ knew me you’d let me fail.’

‘I know you well enough to know you were going to anyway. You don’t want it enough.’

And there it is. The truth: Guan Shan doesn’t. He didn’t want the fight enough. Didn’t want the money enough. Didn’t want the grades e-fucking-nough that he would strip the cloth from his back and let life flay him until he got it. What he wants… it’s abject. It’s a grey marshland stretched out between waking life and something else. What he wants--he doesn’t know how to get. There’s just the shape of a hand, lines in the fingertips, an upturned corner of a mouth.  

Guan Shan closes his eyes. The car is warm now: their bodies, their heated breathing, the low grumble of the engine. The windshield is cold enough that he could draw a finger through the condensation like a dust-smeared window.     

‘Fucked a student. Faked a grade. You’re fucked up.’

Beside him, He Tian hums his acquiescence, runs his hand across Guan Shan’s knee. He flicks the cigarette out the window. 

‘I told you,’ he says. ‘I know what I am.’

**Author's Note:**

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